Someone is going to kill Emma on “Once Upon a Time,” and you won’t believe who she thinks it is

Emma Swan and her assorted cohort of friends, family, and frenemies have been through *quite* a bit over the past five seasons of Once Upon a Time (to put it mildly). They’ve saved Storybrooke from multiple foes and a few members of the crew have even come back from the dead more than once – the entire second half of last season, for one, involved Emma & Co. rescuing her true love Captain Hook from the Underworld. Before that, Rumple appeared to have died sacrificing himself to take out his dad Peter Pan (but JK, Rumple is actually unkillable and never going anywhere at all). We’ve also gotten news that yet another recently-dead character is on his way back (likely in the form of a flashback episode).

But just because a few have made their way back from certain death doesn’t mean that the show doesn’t allow death to “stick.” Much to our collective grief, we never saw Sheriff Graham again after his untimely demise back in Season 1 (because Jamie Dornan is too busy getting busy on the big screen).

Now, it appears that Emma Swan herself is about to meet her maker – permanently?? – and her killer might just be someone we all know and love.

In last week’s season premiere, we all saw the vision that Emma had after she met with the mysterious Oracle in the woods, after getting a tip from the villainous Mr. Hyde. In the vision, Emma saw herself getting brutally stabbed after she was on the losing end of a battle with a mysterious hooded figure. It was pretty gruesome and shocking, but we were all like, “OK, so this ~looks~ bad, but Emma is totally fine, right?”

Wrong. So wrong. As the Oracle told Emma in no uncertain terms, the sword to the stomach would kill her. Our beloved Ms. Swan is headed on a path straight toward death – and there’s nothing she can do to stop it. Not even her badass hero parents could save her!

In tonight’s “A Bitter Draught,” we got a dramatic reintroduction to the Evil Queen, who made her presence known to the residents of Storybrooke. She and Regina faced off (and it was totally epic), but Regina lost round one as the Queen revealed her maniacal plan – to bring out the darkness remaining in Regina and cause her to destroy the happy endings of her loved ones. Gasp!

While none of us want to believe that Regina could possibly hurt her family – especially after she literally killed a dude just this episode in order to save her former enemies, Snow and Charming – there’s one person who apparently believes that Regina could very well return to her evil ways: Emma.

In the closing moments of the episode, Emma confessed to therapist Archie Hopper that she may have figured out what villain is under the hood in her vision. According to Emma, her future killer could be the Evil Queen – or Regina herself. Neither were standing with the rest of Emma’s family in her vision.

Yikes. This is upsetting for SO many reasons. Not least of which is that I think we’re ~all~ dying to see Captain Swan have at least five minutes of happiness without the danger of imminent death. Am I right?

Our fingers are beyond crossed that Regina resists going bad yet again and manages to hang onto all that sweet, sweet character development she’s accumulated over the past five seasons! We definitely don’t want to see Emma meet the pointy end of that sword – and it would be so much worse if Regina or her evil counterpart were holding it.